Bullish Bidders

Pablo Picasso Titian Joan Miro Philips Wouwerman Edouard Vuillard Oskar Kokoschka Edgar Degas Claude Monet

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The two star lots gracefully lived up to expectations. In fact, the first of the two set a world record.

The bronze figure of a ballet dancer graced with the aura of Degas, who molded the original wax model in 1879-81, was cast after the artist’s death. Legally authentic because the job was done by permission of the copyright owners, it is one of 27 specimens executed between 1922 and 1937. The estimate, £9 million to £12 million ($13-17 million), seemed staggering to those who remembered the world record £5 million (then $9.2 million) that its consignor had paid on February 3, 2004. But bronze casts of the Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, as the figure is now called, are prominently displayed in world-famous museums such as the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Although the bronze figure that Degas never touched with his hands is, in artistic terms, a copy, it was treated as a fetish imbued with the dead artist’s spirit, and a rare fetish at that: Few remain outside museums. At £13.3 million ($18.8 million), it retained its position as the most expensive sculpture ever associated with the Degas name.

The success of the second star lot, which was less ambitious, says even more about the vigor of the art market. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Street Scene of 1914, while typical of the German Expressionist’s work, is hardly unforgettable. The ease with which it realized £5.4 million ($7.7 million) says a lot about the ongoing eagerness of the market for solid works of art within their own range.

More interestingly still, pictures carried by current trends can greatly exceed estimates. Joan Miró’s Femmes et oiseaux dans la nuit, a 1968 cartoon-like composition combining quasi-abstractionism and strident Expressionism, doubled the high estimate as it brought £2 million ($2.9 million).

The strength of the market was further underlined by the success of several modest paintings. A View of Istanbul, 1929 by Oskar Kokoschka sold for £1.5 million ($2.1 million) even though the painter’s attempt to give an impression of topographical detail merely results in confusion.

As with the Old Masters, there was one bargain for connoisseurs. A Paris view of the late 1890s by Pierre Bonnard shows a trawler chugging away on the river as tiny horse carriages standing out against the sky cross a bridge farther away. The masterpiece in toned shades of gray was grabbed by a French collector bidding against the reserve. It was well worth the £301,250 ($430,700) that it cost. Altogether, Sotheby’s came out of the test much better than expected, with 22 out of 29 works selling for a total of £32.6 million ($46.7 million).

Christie’s, which took over with an incomparably better sale, confirmed on February 4 the trends noted at Sotheby’s. Of its 47 lots, 39 added up to £63.4 million ($91.2 million).

Buyers were unhesitatingly bullish, right from lot one, a virtually abstract sculpture carved by Henri Laurens in 1919 in his Cubist style. Femme à la guitare swiftly climbed to £713,250 ($1 million), nearly 50 percent above the high estimate. Freestanding stone figures by Laurens rarely turn up at auction, and he is actively being promoted as a substitute for the vanishing major masters of early 20th-century avant-garde sculpture.

Immediately after, four portraits of prostitutes done by Kees van Dongen following the end of his Fauve period around 1906 sold in a row. The strongest, Femme aux deux colliers, possibly dating from 1910, rose to £1.3 million, followed by Cuirasse d’or, which verges on banality with its sexually provocative posture but nevertheless made £2.9 million ($4.2 million).

This, however, was nothing compared with the extraordinary £5.1 million ($7.3 million) paid for Edouard Vuillard’s Les Couturières. If truly done in 1890, as Christie’s wrote, the lack of any detail in the close-up view of two seamstresses cutting or sewing a red fabric means that it was left unfinished. The presence of a stamp supplied by the artist’s estate proves that it was still in his studio at his death, in 1940, thus backing the assumption. Christie’s had secured a bid on its books, probably an irrevocable one, judging from the conventional symbol and the lack of any bid from the room, and that saw the painting through. Obtaining such a bid in the gloomy atmosphere that reigned in January is itself proof of the feverish yearning that prevails in the market for anything that looks important.